BJ Torunament Question...

Playin in my first BJ Tournament this weekend in Reno...I read SW's Casino Tournament Strategy book sometime back, (a tough read for this meager brain) ... He talks about determining the amount of winnings it would take to to be certain to advance to the next round. My question, if anyone knows.. Is this "amount" a function of of how the round is progressing, or is there some kind of formula that can determine from the start how much would give you the best chance of advancing to the next round? Based on the "buy in" amount maybe??

All you are finding out is that the cutoff money level is proportional to the standard deviation, but in terms of the number of players and not the number of hands.

It should be very very obvious:

The number of hands only establishes the amplitute of the cutoff; the number of players is what sets the standard deviation needed to reach the cutoff, if the tourney is structured on some percentage/percentile advance.

You find the percentage and find how many sd units of positive expectation is needed to place X% moving on. Ie what % area of the tail of normal distribution advances?

Then you examine dollar bankroll predictions, over so many hands, with that level of sd units (sigma) of positive fluctuations. No matter how wildly bets are ranged, the median, over several such tournaments or rounds, will be in square root proportion to the number of players, rather than the number of hands. The average bet size will change, thus the standard deviation per hand will change, but the number of hands will remain constant, thus (QED) the most significant number will be the sqr of the number of players. As players tend to realize that tournament strategy is more short term, and game theory, than long term, they will tend to bet more. But the ingredient that remains the same will always be that results are in proportion to the square root of the number of players.

But how does that effect the fact that for some reason, I seem to
draw slightly better cards in tourneys than I do at regular tables?
This I noticed in my first tournament at the IP in 86; the trend
continues to this day.

The original question is why the cutoffs can be accuarately predicted by some amount of cash times the square root of the number of players?

I answered that. I cannot answer your other questions until you have read the 3 books in the How to Ace series that I have suggested to you. Then we will have a common language.
They are How to Ace:
Calculus
The Rest of Calculus
Statistics.

Til then... bye-bye!

How would you rate a guy that Rates the prob theory above statistics?

Between probability theory and statistics. Probability is not the prediction of random events but it is the method by which the statistics of results are evaluated, after the results are tabulated usually, with interesting exceptions (which the departed DS would claim are my obsessions) for trip ruin(s).

But I do not understand the E.E. that said that.